​On my travels around the City over the last couple of months I keep hearing a familiar story, clients are very early in their adoption or have experienced difficulties with implementations of CRM technologies and need support in changing user psychology in order to maximise their return on investments.

Many organisations in the financial services sector have ageing IT infrastructures and legacy platforms. It is essential that organisations invest in CRM technologies in line with their business objects in order to improve their offering, enhance their heritage and stay ahead of the competition.

From our experience in financial services we understand that there is one key success criteria for implementing new technologies, keep it simple or it won’t be used. We have identified the following initiatives that help support organisations looking to embark on this change;

• Develop a clear understanding of user requirements.
• Scoping is an essential part of all CRM projects, irrespective of which vendor you select. Time and time again we are contacted by organisations who have not valued the scoping phase of projects which has resulted in low user adoption.
• Start small, realise value quickly and add functionality as users ask for it.
• A big bang approach rarely works, users expect to see a return on their time investment in scoping sessions quickly. Start with a few key requirements or departments and rollout in pre-planned phases
• Map user journeys.
• Once user requirements are defined, user journeys should be mapped out to show how they will interact with the solution throughout their working day. This is particularly relevant when looking to maximise the value of complimentary technologies, for example Dynamics CRM and SharePoint.
• Develop a rollout strategy and roadmap for the solution
• Some of our clients have designed truly unique rollout strategies to encourage user adoption, from video campaigns to prize drawers, it’s important to catch the imagination of the user and drive them to see the solution as being essential to their daily tasks. It’s important for any solution implemented to have constant evolution as your business changes, plan for the future after each release of new functionality.
• Integration and Consolidation.
• Many of the organisations that we engage with look to consolidate legacy applications onto Dynamics CRM in order to reduce their technology footprint and drive the use of one strategic platform. With this in mind it is essential that integration to key back office systems is implemented in order to reduce data silos.

Pythagoras is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner delivering tailored, integrated solutions across Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, Office 365 and Yammer to organisations throughout Financial Services.